- Married French composer Darius Milhaud, her cousin. Their son Daniel, born in 1930, became a painter.
- Madeleine Milhaud was born in Paris to Michel and Maria Milhaud. Her father was from Aix-en-Provence, and her mother from Brussels.
- She wrote the libretti for her husband's operas Médée, Bolivar, and La mère coupable.
- Neither her Belgian mother nor her lawyer father was particularly musical. Born in Paris, she first experienced the power of music at 15 through hearing Sarah Bernhardt, whose voice had "very characteristic and extremely songlike inflections".
- She also read poetry on the radio, usually being free to make her own choice of poets. Her understanding of music, which she had also studied, enabled her to perform speaking parts in musical works, such as Joan of Arc in Arthur Honegger's oratorio Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher, and she also played Joan in different plays, mainly for the radio.
- Her brain remained clear and her memory excellent, as she proved in a series of interviews she gave to Roger Nichols for his Conversations with Madeleine Milhaud (1996).
- Madeleine studied with the actor-director Charles Dullin, which gave rise to a number of anecdotes that were an irresistible feature of her company. "You're very small," said Dullin, which she was. "And I," recorded Madeleine, "had a wild impulse to say to him, 'and you, Maître, have quite a pronounced hump!' ".
- She was a French actress and librettist.
- Madeleine was a marvellous storyteller due to her professional diction and timing (and English learned from her nanny).
- Although it was as the widow of the composer Darius Milhaud that Madeleine Milhaud became principally known after her husband's death in 1974, and she wished it that way, she had her own career as actress, producer and designer, and was perfectly familiar with everything to do with the stage and concert hall, so that when in her middle nineties she was invited once again to perform as a diseuse, she accepted the invitation without hesitation and received accolades.
- She was at the centre of Parisian theatrical and musical life for more than 80 years; no visit to the French capital was complete without tea and biscuits in her flat on the boulevard de Clichy.
- As a teenager she did some acting and later joined Charles Dullin's classes at his workshop for young actors, the Atelier, performing small roles in plays and even singing, on one occasion in Aristophanes's The Birds, a song written for her by Georges Auric.
- After the death of her husband Darius Milhaud she pursued actions to publicize and perpetuate his work. It is in this spirit that she deposited, in 1977, in the Department of the Phonotheque and Audiovisual, a collection of 110 unpublished recordings, on magnetic tapes, comprising the essential of the instrumental, orchestral and vocal work of Milhaud, including his operas (Esther de Carpentras, Maximilien, Médée...).
- Her husband Darius taught at Mills College (in California) and Madeleine taught American students about French and French theatre during their stay in the USA.
- She, her husband and son fled France when the Germans were within range of Paris in May 1940. They reached Lisbon and from there sailed to America, where they and their 10-year-old son stayed for the remainder of the war.
- She first heard the music of her cousin Darius, the First Symphonic Suite, in May 1914, but could not later be sure whether this had struck her so much as the fact that she had left behind a little fur wrap. But from then on she attended the first performances of all his works.
- She was awarded Knight of the Legion of Honour.
- When she was studying music in Paris, she also moved in literary circles, often attending readings at Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, which had Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Co across the street, so she met many writers of both languages.
- Madeleine married her cousin, Darius Milhaud, in 1925. Darius' piano suite La Muse Menagère (The Household Muse) is dedicated to her, and depicts their daily life together.
- She began acting at a young age, and had a long career as an actress and reciter.
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